Recent advancements in deep learning have led to the development of powerful language models (LMs) that excel in various tasks. Despite these achievements, there is still room for improvement, particularly in enhancing reasoning abilities and incorporating multimodal data. This report investigates the potential impact of combining Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and Visual Question Answering (VQA) techniques to improve LM's accuracy in solving multiple-choice questions. By employing TextVQA and ScienceQA datasets, we assessed the effectiveness of three text embedding methods and three visual embedding approaches. Our experiments aimed to fill the gap in current research by investigating the combined impact of CoT and VQA, contributing to the understanding of how these techniques can improve the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art models like GPT-4. Results from our experiments demonstrated the potential of these approaches in enhancing LM's reasoning and question-answering capabilities, providing insights for further research and development in the field, and paving the way for more accurate and reliable AI systems that can handle complex reasoning tasks across multiple modalities.

Financial reports offer critical insights into a company's operations, yet their extensive length--typically spanning 30-40 pages--poses challenges for swift decision-making in dynamic markets. To address this, we leveraged fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) to distill key indicators and operational metrics from these reports basis questions from the user. We achieved results comparable to baseline on the final numerical answer, a competitive accuracy in numerical reasoning and calculation. Analyzing financial reports serves as a powerful tool for various stakeholders to gain crucial insights into a company's performance and health Gupta et al. (2021). Investors rely on these reports to assess the company's profitability, growth potential, and risk levels, aiding their investment decisions. For management, these reports offer a window into operational efficiency, helping in strategic planning and identifying areas for improvement. Creditors and lenders use this data to gauge a company's ability to meet financial obligations and assess lending risks.

Gliomas are the most common primary brain malignancies, with different degrees of aggressiveness, variable prognosis and various heterogeneous histologic sub-regions, i.e., peritumoral edematous/invaded tissue, necrotic core, active and non-enhancing core. This intrinsic heterogeneity is also portrayed in their radio-phenotype, as their sub-regions are depicted by varying intensity profiles disseminated across multi-parametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) scans, reflecting varying biological properties. Their heterogeneous shape, extent, and location are some of the factors that make these tumors difficult to resect, and in some cases inoperable. The amount of resected tumor is a factor also considered in longitudinal scans, when evaluating the apparent tumor for potential diagnosis of progression. Furthermore, there is mounting evidence that accurate segmentation of the various tumor sub-regions can offer the basis for quantitative image analysis towards prediction of patient overall survival. This study assesses the state-of-the-art machine learning (ML) methods used for brain tumor image analysis in mpMRI scans, during the last seven instances of the International Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) challenge, i.e. 2012-2018. Specifically, we focus on i) evaluating segmentations of the various glioma sub-regions in pre-operative mpMRI scans, ii) assessing potential tumor progression by virtue of longitudinal growth of tumor sub-regions, beyond use of the RECIST criteria, and iii) predicting the overall survival from pre-operative mpMRI scans of patients that undergone gross total resection. Finally, we investigate the challenge of identifying the best ML algorithms for each of these tasks, considering that apart from being diverse on each instance of the challenge, the multi-institutional mpMRI BraTS dataset has also been a continuously evolving/growing dataset.